The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.


Review
The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over ... Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. The Buried Giant is an exceptional novel. (Neil Gaiman New York Times)

What Ishiguro has delivered, after much labour, is a beautiful fable with a hard message at its core ... there won't, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year than The Buried Giant. And take note, Peter Jackson. Ishiguro's fiction makes wonderful films. (John Sutherland The Times)

Ishiguro is, as ever, very readable ... the novel is moving and strangely resonant. I suspect him of being wise, of having a vision that subtly and politely exceeds that of ordinary people ... Ultimately the novel achieves a tragic synthesis between its various parts that ... reverberates powerfully in the mind. (Theo Tait Sunday Times)

The Buried Giant ... reveals itself as a work not just of great originality but peculiar, even hypnotic, beauty: such a late, great extension to Arthurian literature. (David Sexton Evening Standard)

To be updated